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To be honest, just about every date system except the US one is fairly acceptable; every other combination I've seen puts them in a sensible order (YMD or DMY). I can't for the life of me see why the US decided to put the smallest unit between the two larger units, other than just to be awkward on a level that's similar to French decimal time!

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it." - The Conclave

That reminds me! I'm currently reading a great book called Play Something Dancy, it's a non-fiction by a guy who used to work as a strip club DJ and has some incredible stories. If I didn't already know the author from his podcast I wouldn't believe a lot of it, but he's an intelligent and charismatic dude and he seems pretty sincere to me. Even if it was all horseshit, the anecdotes are so authentic and emotionally honest that it would make decent fiction anyway.

I'm sure I don't have to point out that this book about working in a strip club has some contentious material, so if you're easily offended (kind of impossible in an age where 50 shades is mainstream) maybe skip this one.

Sorry, said all those words and forgot to mention why this is relevant. Theres a bit of the book where he mentions one clubs policy on pornography, it was a sackable offence to not have porn playing on the video screens at all time. So in his case, NSFW is a blank screen or anything thats not porn. I can't comment on whether that would be awesome or not, but I work for a fashion company so I can say seeing naked girls on a company bulletin board is pretty boring to me now. Especially since the girls in question are all emaciated and kind of look like boys.

Jesus Christ that was a lot of words for such a non-point. Just buy the book it's really good!

Oh also, Laldy you seem to like music that I either already like or didn't know that I liked yet so it's only a matter of time I should think. Particularly with Temper Trap and Clint Mansell. If you'd seen the amount of times I tried to make Science of Fear work on multiple videos then just pulled my hair out...

Quanta, I've been meaning to ask this for a while but what exactly is monochrom? At first I assumed it was a collective but the vimeo had it listed as the director, is it a one man thing? Your full time employ or a side project? If it's the latter it looks like quite an expensive one. Some handsome shots in the video, did you get permission for the UN stuff or was it just clever editing with only the establishing outdoor stuff actually being there? And how many of these questions will you read before it seems kinda annoying? Is this one your limit? How about this one?

I'm 12 years old and I was born in 2991. I weight about 51 stone, and my car can legally go at 07mph. I bought some pizza today because it was 05% off, and so it only came to £09.8!

I do use DMY, but smallest first is actually completely backwards from... well, everything

It might be because im replying to this at 5 am, but I really dont see the relevance of any of your examples danny :P...

Date is an entirely different measurement compared to your examples.. I mean, you use this example saying youre 12, born in 2991 (for which I must have missed the joke, unless you meant 21 in 1991)..

So, how is DMY backwards in comparison to the above examples? Im assuming youre referring to decimals? even if you are, it still makes sense to measure time differently to say, money..

Personally, silly methods aside, the only logical ones to my mind are DMY or YMD... but even YMD seems backwards to me, because I think of time and date as something that ascends rather than decends.

Regardless of that, it doesnt make much sense to mix the units of measurement up into M D Y.... thats like going from medium, to small, to large. Small medium large makes more sense, because they increase in measurement size with each step.

Personally, silly methods aside, the only logical ones to my mind are DMY or YMD... but even YMD seems backwards to me, because I think of time and date as something that ascends rather than decends.

Regardless of that, it doesnt make much sense to mix the units of measurement up into M D Y.... thats like going from medium, to small, to large. Small medium large makes more sense, because they increase in measurement size with each step.

This actually raises some quite interesting questions about time and how it is experienced. One's experience of time is apparantly connected to once languages (note: I have not personally read any of the studies of this, so it's all second-hand information). That is to say, most people who speak a "western language" seem to regard time as kind of a flowing river. Going from left (the past) to right (the future). If your writing system is different, like for example with Mandarin Chinese, you might see time as something that flows from the top to the bottom. More of a waterfall than a river, I guess. Furthermore, the way tense is handled in the language seems to play a role as well. If present and future tense are handled in the same way (with the same conjugation) it seems like a smaller gap between the present and the future is percieved. So how you think about time can be radically different, depending on what languages you speak.

Note: I'm not actually joining any debate for or against systems for writing time. This is just me being kind of philosophical about languages on a saturday morning (I'm not sure how that is any different from how I am at ANY OTHER given time, but I'm sure there's some difference. :P).

Im sorry, but that makes even less sense than the silly american way. It should always go from the smallest unit of measurement. Day, Month, Year. I will always use this :P

Just like everything else! I mean, I write a hundred and twenty three as 321. All. The. Time. Right now it's a quarter to twelve here, so it's 45:11! Get with the program everyone!

And before you comment, time and date are related in that they're both units of time. It's especially great if you specify a datetime like February 28 2013 21:45:22. That'll come out as 28-2-2013 21:45:22 which is going up from small to big to small again. Totally idiotic. 2013-2-28 21:45:22 makes way more sense.

Note: I'm not actually joining any debate for or against systems for writing time. This is just me being kind of philosophical about languages on a saturday morning (I'm not sure how that is any different from how I am at ANY OTHER given time, but I'm sure there's some difference. :P).

That's really interesting. Was thinking that D/M/Y vs Y/M/D probably depends on how your language approaches certain things, like how nouns always come at the end of sentences in certain languages (but have no actual evidence of this myself).

On a similar note, clearly the US M/D/Y comes from how it is spoken - 'The Amurrcan Constitution was adopted on september seventeenth, seventeen eighty-seven'. Which is marginally faster than saying 'seventeenth of september'.

Trying to avoid affectations of language, logically Y/M/D probably makes the most sense (but there's little fun to be had in doing everything logically).

This actually raises some quite interesting questions about time and how it is experienced...

I read an article just the other day about this, taking it even further with the hypothesis that because Mandarin expresses the future through context rather than with explicit grammatical forms in the manner of western languages, it engages speakers more closely with consequence of actions in the present and leads to a more conservative society where people save more.

Interesting ideas, but pretty radical in how far they take the proposition that language fundamentally shapes thought process. The whole area (wiki Linguistic Relativity if you want an inroad) is a fascinating one though, and one of the most actively debated fields in the science of language in the past century.

I read an article just the other day about this, taking it even further with the hypothesis that because Mandarin expresses the future through context rather than with explicit grammatical forms in the manner of western languages, it engages speakers more closely with consequence of actions in the present and leads to a more conservative society where people save more.

I think the thing I heard about (was it a TEDtalk maybe?) discussed pretty much the same thing. It had the same focus on economics as well. I have some doubts about the methods used and the conclusions drawn, but the results are interesting nonetheless. At the very least as a thought experiment. It would be very interesting to see what happens if you compare with bilingual countries.

I also like the Rizlar's idea, about it possibly being connected to things like SOV (Subject-Object-Verb word order) vs. SVO in the language in question. The hypothesis seems to hold up when I just compare it to the languages I know fairly well. So there might be something to it.